When confronted for the first time with the work of Stefano Rambaldi, one cannot fail to be struck by a particular type of polychromy that seems to arise from a palette on which certain very rare colors are diluted: they are the tints that a nature multifaceted he used for his daring geological creations of pyrite and basalt, for his stratifications of clays and schists, but also the colors of a mirage, of a mythological tale.
They are colors that act on our emotions and perceptions with their fabulistic magnificence, which captivate us with their opulence, understood not as a waste of means but as an abundance of shapes and colors, an antidote to a standardization and a consequent sloppiness to which it's getting harder and harder to escape.
More than original, an artist is required to be authentic: sincere, in a nutshell, and in these works it is precisely the absence of sophistication that is first noticed, it is a refined but not artificial painting, complex without be confused.
It is known that an artist almost never sets limits in a technical sense, and Stefano Rambaldi is no exception to this principle, on the contrary, he accelerates its dynamics to such an extent that he is constantly prey to an urgency that drives him, after having experienced the majority, to turn to new materials, new techniques, new representative modules.
Thus he can continuously reinvent himself and at the same time open up further space in the imagination of the viewer.
Rambaldi treats his subject, whatever it is, with certainty and above all with confidence.
This is not the privilege of every artist, but he does it, as well as with noteworthy intellectual honesty, with an equally noteworthy pictorial procedure. The multi-material surfaces of his paintings show explicit watermarks, textures, chromatic cobwebs, labyrinth paths paved with Byzantine tiles that here flow into purple Levantine paths, there they recall the dull golds of the old frames that frame church paintings: he invents his own hieroglyphic sign and makes him invade the surface at his disposal.
The first thing that catches the eye is the physical component of this work, which at times seemed, in some of its meanings, to evoke the ephemeral images traced by certain aborigines on the ground making use of multicolored silica powders: but it is immediately clear that it is of a qui pro quo, since they call even more to the imagination the sands of unknown islands, dry beds of non-existent rivers channeled into soft barriers, sandstone embroideries of imaginary cathedrals, or certain tortuous, porphyry paths where a grazing light discovers where a grazing light discovers oriental opulence, amber icon-like reflections.
These are paths and routes that at first glance displace a superficial observer, who realizes only later that he has already traveled them in a dream: they represent the transposition onto a flat support of a fabric of sensations and reminiscences that come from a world parallel to ours, the same and different, and which are translated here into a graphic sign.
It is a mnemonic recovery, and this provenance from a repurchased and transformed era is felt even more in the three-dimensional works, where the material takes on a greater detachment and a clearer spatial immediacy, a tangibility that allows you to go around it and to sensorially possess those woods that are rough like cork, porous like sponges, smoothed by time, dug by certain bad weather, survivors of certain shipwrecks.
As for the meticulous technique of interlocking and recomposing, perfectionistic and so accurate as to be almost devoted, with which these trouvailles are elaborated in works full of sumptuous tension, it cannot be noticed, even by the most casual spectator. This pictorial alphabet requires, indeed demands, from the observer, careful interpretation and passionate participation.
Stefano Rambaldi is a multifaceted artist, enjoyable in his figurative and sumptuous spatial materiality, which could only be defined by creating a new oxymoron, that of dreamlike concreteness: which, translated into good money, means the effective possibility of translating the imagination in image.
It is a lot, even if it seems little, but basically it is what is asked of any craftsman who wants to combine the poetry of the dreamer with the perseverance and energy of the builders of cathedrals.
Amsterdam, November 2007
Sandro Santoni